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As one of the people behind elementary OS, this blog posts pretty much summarises how hard of a time I have when reading online criticism on elementary OS. Feedback is good, we love it and realize how important it is. However, for the most part the complaints are not about the OS itself but instead on some of these myths (or worse even, how we're "just a blatant copy of OS X" when we have our own ideas and identity).
We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.
Perhaps it could help make it easy for visitors of your site to know what elementaryOS is, even in broad strokes. I had to go to the main page and then scroll down a few screens until I found this sentence:
"elementary OS is a free replacement for Windows on the PC and OS X on the Mac."
Not having that at the top of the first screen, people do have to find this information elsewhere.
Indeed, they give how-the-sausage-is-made first and second billing, how-pretty-it-is third billing, and what-it-is in the fourth and final slot. It's almost exactly upside down.
First of all great work on Elementary. One thing that doesn't help with the "Copy of OSX" comments is the video on the front page where the desktop uses the Mountain Lion wallpaper.
> desktop uses the Mountain Lion wallpaper.
It's not exactly the same as far as I know. You can use another picture of the same Galaxy without it being the same picture. Plus it appears for 5 seconds on the video and not all the time. They are other wallpapers shown in the video.
The fact that it needs defending is kind of the point. It looks similar enough to evoke the reaction from most people that it is similar to OS X, which is more than like a goal and not an accident. It may not be the exact image, but it doesn't have to be.
For those who are wondering which is the galaxy that is being talked about:
It was a fan-made video, none of us could really make our own. It was pretty good so we decided to put it up on the front page.
These replies do not help. For people who don't want to live on Ubuntu LTS versions (and such people probably don't want to install the first version of a new OS), Luna is "over 2 years old", and it was already seriously out of date when it came out.
Elementary OS know what people mean when they say Luna is out of date (all the packages are over 2 years old), yet give an answer that completely ignores that issue.
I see your point about public perception.
For another viewpoint I'm running dev of a side project on an elementary laptop. Since bleeding edge of postgres and python doesn't matter much for me it is actually quite good. (relational database, no scaling problem for now and python packages are installed using virtualenv and pip. Sublime text also works nicely on two year old kernel )
The thing about elementary and OS X is that elementary seems a whole lot better than OS X. This wouldn't count of course if I hadn't used OS X a few years. (Then again I mostly have used Linux whenever possible for the last 5-10 years and I also think Windows 8 is great.)
Things that are better (in my view) in elementary are for example: alt-tab, standard open source apps works nicely (no need to run in an extra x), no global menu.
Of course no Mac user should switch, but for anyone like me who almost like mac except for the:"stupid" parts elementary is great.
I use it, but have gone to using nautilus on it as the default file manager keeps crashing every few days. Generally I find it pretty good though.
When will translucency effect coming to elementary OS?
Open a terminal and enter this:
cd ~ && mkdir -p ~/.temp-plank-themer && cd ~/.temp-plank-themer && wget https://github.com/rhoconlinux/plank-themer/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip && cd plank-themer-master/ && rm -fR ~/.config/plank/dock1/theme_index; rm -fR ~/.config/plank/dock1/themes-repo; cp -a theme_index/ ~/.config/plank/dock1 && cp -a themes-repo/ ~/.config/plank/dock1 && cd ~ && rm -R ~/.temp-plank-themer && sh ~/.config/plank/dock1/theme_index/plank-on-dock-themer.sh
You're severely fooling yourself if you truly think Elementary isn't copying OSX everywhere.
I think we're all severely fooling our selves if we don't realize every OS copies features from other OS's.
After seeing some demos of the new UI features in Isis, which are pretty original and amazing, I don't think it's copying OSX any more than the later and iOS are copying Microsoft's modern UI with Yosemite.
It's very impressive that a relatively small team could rewrite huge swathes of userland applications from scratch, and end up with something more polished and lighter-weight than much of the competition.
It seems like the sort of thing which could happen as a matter of course if the money was there from the community to support developers working full-time over the long term on these sorts of projects.
One thing I'd like to see would be elementary experimenting with ways of encouraging people to support development. It really should be a matter of course to donate $20-30 in exchange for something which makes your computer function substantively better, especially when many of the users are IT professionals who earn good salaries. But it doesn't appear to happen, for one reason or another.
Perhaps, open up the books, and give people real-time, kickstarter-like information about the donations as they are ongoing, where the money will be spent, and how much more is needed. I'm sure there must be a way of nudging people to get out their chequebooks.
> something more polished
What do you mean by this? IMO the last time I used EOS it was lacking in a lot of areas. This was only a few months ago.
Installation was fast and everything was automated, the install window had a "drop-down" terminal to watch processes, but nothing was there. I expected to be asked to re-size my partitions but never was. When I rebooted I noticed grub was a little borked, showing EOS, EOS recovery, Windows 7, and then about 30 or so entries of old kernels (I know I need to clean these up). It should have showed two more ubuntu OSs installed. I can still boot into my other two installations fine, I just had to do some guess work on what to pick in grub.
So I get into EOS and things are pretty cool, the thing I like best is the speed. Everything seems instant, well except the applications menu, it was a few milliseconds slower than anything else on the DE and that was annoying as I would often end up clicking it a second time causing it to open twice, which was kind of hard on the eyes. Coming from a Gnome 3 environment, I decided to change some things on the interface around to make it more like the gnome shell. Moved the launcher to the left, assigned the top left hot corner to show all windows, things were looking pretty good.
I tried using midori but the font rendering was just not worth it so I installed chromium, and of course that came with a lot of dependencies (around 300mb), so I tried to find out exactly how much space I had left on the partition (I some how missed the partition editor in the install). I opened the file browser and really liked it. you could see how much space was being used by each partition with "progress bars", but not by the EOS partition. There was no way to right click and select "properties" on the EOS partition, so I opened up the applications menu (twice) to find the "system monitor", because on Ubuntu, the system monitor shows how much space you have. But the OS had no graphical system monitor. I'm sure top was installed, but it's not the same. I was able to right click my home folder and select properties and this showed how much space I had on my partition.
Next I opened the terminal. I forget the name of the default terminal, but it wasn't gnome-terminal. It was a very utilitarian terminal that had tabs and no menu bar. I couldn't figure out how to change the look of it or get the tabs to go away.
Overall I give EOS a 5.9/10 It's fast, but it lacks a lot of functionality I look for in an OS like this. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I feel it will be a long time before EOS is as robust and polished as Ubuntu. I realize that EOS is meant to be lighter than Ubuntu and use different programs, but at this point it's just not ready to be my work horse.
"You’ve made a $20.88 USD payment to elementary.
This charge will appear on your statement as “WPY*elementary”"
I paid!
elementary OS is one of the most promising Linux distributions. This for several reasons, like having a good installer and an overall clean desktop experience. But also because of the applications they are making themselves like Noise or Files.
That being said, I don't agree with some of the design decisions, which stop me from fully supporting the project.
For example I don't like the idea of having a top panel. It is constantly there wasting space only to show some tray icons a clock and a link to a launcher menu. Personally I prefer a single panel on the bottom, think Windows 7, there is enough horizontal space to show everything in a single row. Top panels just look bad in my opinion, for a normal maximized window you have the panel layer, then the titlebar layer, then the window. If you insist on having the notification bar on top at least, please, use wingpanel-slim (with the application launcher disabled and autohide).
The 'outdated' comment stems from the fact that we depend very much on the repos. Being based on an old release means we don't have access to lots of software.
I use Elementary on the desktop and laptop and like it. Can't wait for dock improvements.
The first myth is a valid point, although it comes across as a little defensive. The person who wrote it is an elementary OS developer, I suspect, and I wonder if they are missing an important point: it would be FUCKING AWESOME if Elementary OS were "just a theme on top of Ubuntu."
It would presumably mean more frequent releases, less dependency on any given version of Ubuntu, smaller workload on the developers, and so on. Reinventing every part of the OS, including the bits that people hope to use as little as possible, might not be the best strategy at this stage. (I have no illusions as to whether they'll change their strategy)
The problem I have with elementaryOS is that there is no defined release schedule (like e.g Ubuntu or Fedora). So there's no ETAs or anything.
It's kind of sad too, because the Elementary developers originally planned to release Isis (the next release) around April to prove that they can stick to schedules [0], but that now seems to have changed to the usual "It'll be done when it's done." Relevant quote below:
"Also, I think in general most of us think it would be the best idea to release Isis (see, I'm already going with it) as closely as possible to Ubuntu 14.04. We have a lot to prove about our ability to provide updates in a timely manner and we're getting some negative feedback from developers/nerds about our 12.04 base. So let's address that and make sure that elementary is the best open platform for both users and developers (and I guess nerds too)."
[0] https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-community/msg0257...
Which would be better though, a rush job, or something that has polish (which seems to be the whole goal of Elementary). I suppose it is kind of like the difference between Valve and so many other games publishers out there.
eOS has too much eye candy. Someone suggested in the comment section to install alucryd's PKGBUILDs to gain access to updated packages on Arch. If you're already thinking of Arch because of that comment, this should be enough eye candy: lightdm, cinnamon + CoverflowAltTab, plank + plank-themer, nautilus or spaceFM, themes like Numix + cinnamon-chronumix [1], awesomeWM, and reEFInd and a minimal theme [2]. Not sure why people opt in for a visual representation of applications when they need to browse to install applications...there's the list of applications in the wiki and /r/unixporn if you need visuals..
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/serdotlinecho/cinnamon-chr...
[2] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/32729998da4401a2aef674308...
When it comes to problems with Linux as a personal desktop OS, the appearance of the GUI is among my lowest concerns. What prevents me from considering Linux as a desktop or laptop OS includes: horrible battery life times (worse than half for a friend's thinkpad when compared to it running Windows), how difficult it is to get Bluetooth and Wifi working, really bad multi-touch for trackpads.
The problems with Linux as a replacement for Windows or Mac are that the fundamentals are not there. Recent hardware support is non-existent as volunteers have to write drivers so you're likely stuck with old hardware. You'll get anecdotes of people who are happy with what they have, but any such person that I've known long enough I've seen them gripe on IRC about things that are completely trivial or just not even issues on Windows or a Mac.
Linux needs a hero with deep pockets that builds their own hardware and drivers. I thought Dell might have been that hero once, but it never became a priority for them.
If you could get elementary OS working on a nice slim, powerful Samsung or Thinkpad laptop, with good battery life and driver support then I'd think you'd really have something.
> What prevents me from considering Linux as a desktop or laptop OS includes: horrible battery life times (worse than half for a friend's thinkpad when compared to it running Windows), how difficult it is to get Bluetooth and Wifi working, really bad multi-touch for trackpads.
Not sure where you are coming from, to be honest.
Bluetooth and Wifi have unerringly worked out of the box for me since 2009 or so.
While multi-touch, and the trackpad in general, is _horrible_ on my Asus UX31E Zenbook in Windows, it is very pleasant to use in Linux.
As for power savings, have a look at TLP: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-man...
Using TLP, battery life on my laptop is about the same as in Windows.
Personally I recently had more problems with windows that with linux.
I have a dell l502x of 2012. In linux all work perfectly (except obviously the nvidia card that require bumblebee)
In windows8 my touchpad has not good driver. Those for win7 runs but the multitouch is broken and the "deactive touchpad" button does not work, so I keep clicking it while writing. Also the wifi card keep stoping randomly while on linux all work smoothly.
Long story short: I think linux has made really enough improvements firmware side to be considered as main os for all days.
This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows installation.
Linux has worked very well on the business-class thinkpad machines for more than 15 years. Look for the T or X series, for example. These days you need to avoid machines with nVidia graphics.
A T-series thinkpad with intel graphics will just work out of the box on any linux distribution.
I don't have multitouch (completely unaware whether the hardware supports it, not terribly interested), but I have bluetooth, wifi, and tremendous battery life that all worked out of the box on my System76 laptop.
I was honestly expecting a post about the accusations of being an "OSX clone/ripoff/etc."
Quick question, does ElementaryOS handle hiDPI better than any DE out there? I found frustrating it on gnome 3.12.
Which OS? For some reason Arch's Gnome handles hiDPI terribly, but Gnome Ubuntu is very good. So I stopped fighting it and just installed Gnome Ubuntu.
Jeez, thanks I'm exactly on Arch -.-'
I love eOS but I've been spoiled by Unity and Google Chrome, I hate having the title bar.
Most important point: does ElementaryOS support EFL-based elementary apps ?
I'm missing Myth #6: elementaryOS is a clone of OS X
Fine I didn't think my comment was THAT bad.
And I'm missing fact #1: WTF is elementaryOS and why should I care?
It's a Linux distro, read here: http://elementaryos.org/